A Strange Saga of Bribery, Skinny-Dipping, and a 12-Ton Sea Cow

Steller’s sea cow grew to an astonishing 33 feet long and 24,000 pounds while its head stayed comically small.

On July 12, 1742, German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller was standing atop a titanic beast hitherto unknown to science, taking measurements and jotting down descriptions while battling marauding foxes keen on stealing his food and, for reasons known only to the foxes, his maps and papers and ink.

He and a handful of other men were shipwrecked. They’d run aground on a small frozen island between Russia and what is now Alaska and had little food. Their captain, the famed Vitus Bering, was dead of scurvy. Steller, a brilliant man who did not suffer fools gladly, was woefully unpopular among the crew, who happened to be fools. Furious dispute had erupted when, no joke, Steller insisted they eat their vegetables to stave off scurvy.

But Steller needed their help to handle the colossal creature, a cousin of the manatee that reached a mind-boggling 33 feet long and 24,000 pounds. For perspective, 24,000 pounds is equal to 20 manatees, or four killer whales, or one school bus, including all the kids and their books and Lunchables and whatnot.

The crew, however, was more concerned with constructing a new boat from the wreckage, as Steller recounted in his posthumously published work The Beasts of the Sea. But he succeeded in using tobacco to bribe men to help him pull the guts out of the critter, including a stomach that measured 6 by 5 feet. The hired hands, though, “in their ignorance and dislike for the work,” jerked mercilessly at the organs and tore them to shreds, not leaving a single one intact.

Between the foxes and fools and freezing rain and lack of reference books, it’s a miracle he could compile so astonishingly thorough a description of the beast that would take his name: Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas). It was a new sirenian, an order of marine mammals including manatees and dugongs so named because they flash and scream when threatened (no they don’t — they’re named after the sirens of Greek mythology, who, like these animals, frequented shorelines).

The Vitus Bering expedition shipwrecks near birds that the artist spent literally 20 seconds painting.

The fossil record shows that Steller’s sea cow once roamed much of the Pacific Rim, from Japan up through Russia and Alaska and down to Baja California. But when Steller first described it, the last 2,000 or so on Earth had been sequestered to just two islands: the one on which he was shipwrecked — later named, appropriately, Bering Island — and neighboring Medny Island. Just three decades later, the sea cow was extinct. (From here on out I’m dropping the “Steller’s” for brevity’s sake. A sea cow can technically be any sirenian, but you know what I mean.)

While no one is exactly sure why the sea cow’s distribution had shrunk so dramatically in the millennia before its introduction to science, we know why those final 2,000 perished. Their niche, according to paleontologist Daryl Domning, had been compromised.

In the mid-18th century, the Russian market for sea otter pelts went wild in what is known as the Fur Rush, a blood orgy that nearly wiped the creature from the planet. “What that did was remove a predator of sea urchins,” said Domning, “and so when they knocked back the sea otter populations, then the sea urchins would have proliferated. We’ve observed this happening in the modern era. And with more sea urchins, they would feed on the kelp, which was the sea cow’s food supply.”

A Steller’s sea cow grazes as a sea otter applauds its efforts. I jest. The otter is just holding a sea urchin … I think. This is from a U.S. government document. They don’t exactly splurge on artwork over there.

The mighty sea cow was, in a sense, muscled out by the lowly sea urchin. And it’s possible that native peoples had long ago initiated the same chain reaction along the coasts of what is now Canada and the western United States, leaving just that small population for Steller to discover.

Beyond the loss of kelp, European otter hunters wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter sea cows for their plentiful meat. And the northern Pacific wasn’t even an ideal habitat for sea cows to begin with, on account of these creatures preferring temperate zones. Indeed, during cruel arctic winters, Steller said, they became so skinny that “all the ribs” showed.

It’s quite the feat to fuel a body the size of a school bus — on kelp no less, which isn’t exactly calorie-rich. So the sea cow would eat incessantly, and “because they are so greedy they keep their heads always under water, without regard to life and safety,” Steller wrote.

Thus sea cows gently trudged the shallows in imposing yet harmless herds, hoovering up kelp until full, at which point they would roll over on their backs and sleep, floating around like bloated, overcooked sausages. Their rather aloof demeanor, though, in addition to their seeming disregard for human contact, made them easy targets.

“Hence a man in a boat, or swimming naked,” wrote Steller, for whatever reason finding the need to point out the nudity, “can move among them without danger and select at ease the one of the herd he desires to strike — and accomplish it all while they are feeding.”

Having spent millions of years largely beyond reach of predators because of its size, the sea cow suddenly found itself outmatched by man, in this particular case the starving crew. Steller’s detailed accounts of their often wildly inhumane hunts are unsettling, and don’t require elaboration here. Those interested may read for themselves. Brutality notwithstanding, it’s a truly fascinating report.

These hunts were massacres, though Steller wrote that the young were far harder to pursue than adults, since they were able to move about much more “vigorously.” This is contrary to the general order of things in nature: Lions, for example, target young prey for their weakness and sluggishness, not just to be jerks.

One might wonder why such a massive, ungainly body would evolve in the first place. “That is most obviously an adaptation to cold weather,” said Domning. “They simply have a better surface-to-volume ratio, less surface area per unit of volume, so they’re better insulated against the cold.”

Georg Steller atop a female sea cow on July 12, 1742, with two crewmen who sooo don’t want to be here right now.

In addition, sea cows had an extremely thick hide that Steller described as being more like bark than skin, making them the ents of the sea, in a way. Plus, they had a layer of blubber 4 inches thick.

“And also they got rid of their finger bones, basically,” added Domning. “They had very short, stubby flippers, which would among other things have cut down the rate of heat loss.” All brilliant adaptations in an amazing beast that humankind knew far too briefly.

As for Georg Steller, he eventually got off that island. After nine months of misery, the crew finally finished building the makeshift boat and made it back to mainland Russia. All told, on that strange journey Steller had recorded four marine mammals new to science: Steller’s sea lion, the sea otter, the fur seal, and the glorious sea cow.

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